The distros that provide commercial support beside RedHat have been sort of doing something similar. Canonical provides Ubuntu LTS, a distro with 5 years of development, and then additional 5 years of maintenance for those with subscription. SUSE, also, 5 years major release support for OpenSUSE where there is continuous development, and then if you want the full 10 years (with the additional 5 years of maintenance), you would choose SUSE Enterprise and paid the subscription fee.
Debian provides only 5 years cycle, and no support after that at all.Red Hat is stopping the free 10 years cycle support provided by clones, and going the same route other distros are already in. The difference with RedHat is the fact that their free 5 years cycle distro (centos stream) is a tiny bit ahead of their subscription 10 years one (rhel). I personally don't see it as a deal breaker difference.
Am I missing something about the other distros?I'm using CentOS Stream 9 hardened in production-level servers, and also in personal servers. The tooling, the community maturity, and the SELinux support of Enterprise Linux is much better than the alternative in my opinion.
I use Fedora for my personal workstation and my kid's computer, and what I love the most about Fedora is how it has become the vanguard in innovation among Linux distros.
RedHat is just being a for-profit company, aligning itself with the rest of Linux distros supported by a company. The only main difference is that their "free tier" is slightly ahead of their Enterprise subscription one. It depends how big of a deal that really becomes going forward, but so far I don't see indications that it will be a big deal. They have broken both in the past, the free and the paid.
Their contributions to opensource won't stop. The innovation in Fedora won't stop either. Jeff, I hope you reconsider your decision.
Regards, Carlos R.F. On 6/27/23 07:40, Peter Boy wrote:
Thanks for your writing. A well-balanced and very thoughtful and considered opinion. But your final decision seems to me rather a short-coming.Am 27.06.2023 um 00:47 schrieb Jeff Law <jeffreyalaw@xxxxxxxxx>: ... What Red Hat has done recently is depressing, but not a huge surprise to me. Red Hat struggled repeatedly with how to deal with "the clones". The core idea I always came back to in those discussions was that the value isn't in the bits, but in the stability, services and ecosystem Red Hat enables around the bits. Arguments for protecting the bits were met with something like "if that's what we need to do to be successful, then we're failing to provide real value". At some point in the last 20 years (I forget exactly when) Red Hat was looking to codify its values. Naturally the topic of open source came up during those discussions. When open source didn't make the cut, one could say the writing was on the wall -- open source was a means to an end. In my mind that opened the door for numerous changes we've seen in subsequent years. One could see signs of where this was going with the adjustments that were made to the exposed RHEL kernel sources some time ago. Then the dissolution of CentOS a couple years back and most recently with the lockdown of the RHEL sources. What Red Hat has done may be technically legal and perhaps good for its business. However, to me it's ethically unconscionable. Those who know me know I'm not an zealot, but I do have a baseline set of ethical values and Red Hat crossed that line.I think there is a difference regarding the clones. When Red Hat cancelled the academic licenses I switched all the servers I was responsible for to Scientific Linux, one of the clones. As a public funded University we simply couldn’t afford the new prices. And there was no such thing as "customers" for us to pass on higher costs to. The results of our work are available to the company free of charge. But cases like OracleLinux, where a commercial company takes another company's work and uses it to throw a competing commercial product on the market, are something else, entirely. And they are to be evaluated differently beyond legal licensing issues. And as much as I disapprove of Red Hat's decisions that led to the end of ScientificLinux, at the same time I can kind of understand it. But more differentiation of such circumstances would have been better. Perhaps it is a quandary, unsolvable without compromise.... I've been a Fedora user since before FC1. I run Fedora on my laptop. When I need a docker image for something, I start with a Fedora image. When I need to spin up a server (say to run the GCC CI/CD system) I load it with Fedora. It's an ecosystem I'm technically comfortable in and easiest for me to utilize. That will change across the board this summer. That's a bit hard for me to swallow, but I can't get past that association we built between Red Hat and Fedora and Red Hat's recent actions. I'll still have to deal with the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora ecosystem on a professional level. Obviously, I'll do what I need to do to help make my employer successful -- but when a choice exists, Fedora/CentOS/RHEL won't be where I land going forward.I See, that outside of a professional level, you no longer want to deal with RHEL / CentOS. But why Fedora? It’s „sponsored by Red Hat“, yes, but is not subject to the same commercial and interest-based decisions (at least as far as I know). What's wrong with continuing to contribute to and shape the future of Fedora, especially with your independence of Red Hat? —- Peter Boy _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
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